Yahoo partners with Tata Sonsâ€™ CRL to collaborate on cloud computing research

Yahoo has signed an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, to jointly support cloud computing research. As part of the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers one of the worldâ€™s top five supercomputers that is claimed to have substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.

Yahoo has signed an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, to jointly support cloud computing research. As part of the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers one of the worldâ€™s top five supercomputers that is claimed to have substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.

â€œWe are excited to partner with Yahoo to advance cloud computing research in India as it opens up a new arena of exciting opportunities,â€ Gautam Shroff, member of the steering committee of CRL, has said. â€œWe are initiating dialogue with leading Indian academic institutions to collaborate on research using cloud computing.â€

Cloud computing is a term recently popularised by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. According to Schmidt, cloud computing starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. â€œWe call it cloud computing â€“ they should be in a â€˜cloudâ€™ somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesnâ€™t matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you â€“ or new devices still to be developed â€“ you can get access to the cloud,â€ Eric Schmidt has said.

Former IBM big brain Irving Wladawsky-Berger further explains the concept, â€œIt is basically an internet-based network made up of large numbers of servers – mostly based on open standards, modular and inexpensive. Clouds contain vast amounts of information and provide a variety of services to large numbers of people. Users of the cloud only care about the service or information they are accessing – be it from their PCs, mobile devices, or anything else connected to internet – not about the underlying details of how the cloud works.â€

GigaOm adds, â€œDone right, cloud computing allows application developers and IT operations to develop, deploy and run applications that can easily grow capacity (scalability), work fast (performance), and never â€” or at least rarely â€” fail (reliability), all without any concern as to the nature and location of the underlying infrastructure.â€